A Syrian court on Tuesday sentenced former ruler Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia, after convicting him over charges of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” during the country’s civil war.

The ruling against Assad, who fled with his family to Moscow as rebels closed in on Damascus in December 2024, is the first under the transitional authorities who this year began trying figures from the former government, both in person and in absentia.

Assad, who was born in 1965, became president in 2000 after his father Hafez died.

Shaped in its early years by the Iraq war and crisis in Lebanon, Assad’s rule was defined by civil war, which spiralled out of the 2011 Arab Spring, when Syrians demanding democracy took to the streets, to be met with deadly force.

A Syrian court also sentenced Assad-era official Atif Najib to death for “crimes against humanity” committed when he was head of political security in Daraa province, the cradle of the country’s 2011 uprising.

The court convicted Najib, a cousin of Bashar and arrested in January last year, of crimes including murder, “the intentional killing of children under 15”, and “torture leading to death”.

The acts attributed to him are “crimes against humanity”, the court said as it handed down “the harshest punishment against him, which is the death penalty”.